Name : Barbara VanDenburgh / Alias : Arizona Republic
It's a confident thriller suffused with dread that builds suspense without breaking until it's too late to turn back - with a few jump scares thrown in for good measure.

Name : Stephen Holden / Alias : New York Times
Underneath it all, "The Gift" is a merciless critique of an amoral corporate culture in which the ends justify the means, and lying and cheating are O.K., as long as they're not found out.

Name : Sandy Cohen / Alias : Associated Press
A satisfying directorial debut from writer, producer and actor Joel Edgerton.

Name : Kevin P. Sullivan / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
More than anything, Edgerton's script and direction demonstrate a keen understanding of tension and what puts an audience on edge.

Name : Daisy Bowie-Sell / Alias : Time Out
A darkly unnerving psychological thriller.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
"The Gift" stretches things a little too much for it to be a first-rate thriller. Still, among second-rate thrillers, it's one of the best.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Just when we think we know where The Gift is going, we're surprised. And then surprised again.

Name : Brad Wheeler / Alias : Globe and Mail
Edgerton's touch as a director and writer is fluid - he eerily holds our attention, like Hitchcock holds a door for Tippi Hedren.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
At heart this is a three-character chamber piece. And Bateman, Hall and Edgerton are three very interesting actors showcased in a confident directorial debut.

Name : James Rocchi / Alias : TheWrap
Nothing here feels cheap or hasty, which is why the horror, when it comes, is all the more chilling and grim. Slick, sharp and terrifying, "The Gift" is a truly brilliant thriller - and, one hopes, the first of many features from Edgerton to come.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Edgerton - who also wrote The Square and the story for The Rover - exploits Bateman's smarty-pants persona to chilling effect; he's the rare triple threat who's more valuable behind the camera than in front of it.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
A coolly unsettling thriller that begins as an unironic homage to late-'80s/early-'90s yuppies-in-peril dramas. before taking a turn toward the moral and existential minefield of Michael Haneke's Cache.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
Officially, this is a blank-from-hell movie. But Edgerton has remixed the formula.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
Edgerton isn't above a hoary jump scare or two, but he otherwise tackles his Cape Fear premise with a degree of technical and dramatic intelligence.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
The Gift starts out like so many other thrillers before it - with an attractive, well-to-do couple purchasing a big new house - and then beats its own, uniquely tense and twisted path from there.

Name : Jon Frosch / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Joel Edgerton's feature-length directorial debut is a pleasant - or pleasantly unpleasant - surprise, hitting its genre marks in brisk, unfussy fashion and raising a few hairs on the back of your neck along the way.

Name : Gary Goldstein / Alias : Los Angeles Times
A disturbing drama that twists its outsider-from-hell story into something more unique and unexpected than its marketing campaign might imply.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
One of the many gifts conferred by The Gift is the unaccustomed pleasure of feeling like putty in the hands of a first-rate storyteller.

Name : Peter Keough / Alias : Boston Globe
[An] expertly crafted exercise in guilt, ambiguity and revenge.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
Clever and atmospheric, the film has enough twists to keep the average viewer guessing.

Name : Katharine Pushkar / Alias : New York Daily News
Edgerton seems to have pulled "The Gift" right out of a time capsule from 1992.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
It touches on notions of trust, the male ego and forgiveness, but Edgerton doesn't overturn any new stones.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
This indie pulse-raiser is more of a stealth shocker than an overt one, even if the twisted payoff is telegraphed to anyone paying attention.

Name : Sara Stewart / Alias : New York Post
A dark and ultimately quite nasty psychological thriller from actor/writer/debut director Joel Edgerton, who manages to yank the carpet out from under his audience a couple of times.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : Village Voice
The movie's not bad but it doubles down on its least-interesting and potent elements at the expense of those that actually work.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
It is an interesting idea of a film created by people who have no earthly idea how to do it, a quasi-epic without a thimbleful of wit, style or rooting interest in either of its leads.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
Shouldn't all this geeky property colliding still at least be entertaining? Shouldn't it play to the cheap seats instead of wallowing in the murk?

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : TIME Magazine
As superhero spectacles go, Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is a grand one, with a mondo-operatic climax and a final shot infused with quivering, exhilarating molecules of grace. It's also not much fun.

Name : Matthew Lickona / Alias : San Diego Reader
In a word, exhausting. In a few more, overblown, overstuffed, repetitive, bombastic, and sometimes just dumb. (Never mind dreary to look at and punishing to hear.)

Name : Tim Grierson / Alias : The New Republic
Filled with scenes of gloomy characters confronting their demons or wrestling with insipid moral quandaries, this joyless slog isn't a superhero film so much as it is an excruciating therapy session with huge explosions and guys in capes.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
There's a gravitas here that even the staleist of comic book tropes can't diminish. Snyder, who directed Man of Steel and the failed comic book adaptation Watchmen, is nothing less than respectful. The effects aren't bad, either.

Name : Bob Mondello / Alias : NPR
It's freighted not so much with entertainment value as it is with enough talk of fallen gods, absent parents, and dissolute heroes to fuel a Greek tragedy. And . director Zack Snyder seems convinced that that's what he's making.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
Batman v Superman is kind of dopey and plays out some laborious plot twists in the DC narrative at unnecessary length, but as I've already said it largely kept me entertained for two and a half hours, which is not nothing.

Name : Mara Reinstein / Alias : Us Weekly
A popcorn film - and this is a popcorn film - should never feel like Sunday night homework.

Name : Preston Jones / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
For those who go to the movies to see coherent narratives, [this] is Hollywood's latest exercise in fan service.taking the usual screenplay ingredients of logic, reason and character motivation, tossing it all in a blender and filming the scraps.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Snyder, juiced up by Hans Zimmer's caffeinated score, throws everything at the screen until resistance is futile.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
If only the film actually had depth, along with a little levity to lighten the bulk in the script, the visual murk and the sonic overkill.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
If there's any justice, dawning or otherwise, at the multiplex, audiences will reject Zack Snyder's lumbering, dead-on-arrival superhero melange, a $250 million tombstone for a genre in dire need of a break.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
A joyless slog.

Name : Robert Wilonsky / Alias : Dallas Morning News
In the words of The Joker in a far better Batman movie: "Why so serious?"

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
It's another numbing smash-and-bash orgy of CGI mayhem with an ending that leaves the door open wide enough to justify the next 10 installments. Is it too late to demand a rematch?

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Not as bad as Bush v. Gore, but close.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Snyder sets his story within our modern world and attempts to fashion a kind of commentary on the media and the current geopolitical situation. What he has crafted instead is a grotesque expression of modern emptiness.

Name : Jonathan L. Fischer / Alias : Slate
Blunt, humorless, and baffling, it collides the brutish directorial stamp of its director (he of 300 and Watchmen fame) with the most shameless instincts of our latter-day superhero franchise bubble.

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Snyder delivers a superhero epic that's a significant improvement on his work on its predecessor, "Man of Steel."

Name : Chris Klimek / Alias : NPR
A ponderous, smothering, over-pixelated zeppelin crash of a movie scored by a choir that sounds like it's being drowned in lava.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
It's a shame that Batman v Superman is also a storytelling disgrace. It has maybe six opening scenes and jumps so incessantly from subplot to subplot that a script doctor would diagnose a peculiarly modern infection: "disjunctivitis."

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
The studio has, in the usual way, begged and bullied critics not to reveal plot points, and I wouldn't dream of denying you the thrill of discovering just how overstuffed and preposterous a movie narrative can be.

Name : Bruce Kirkland / Alias : Toronto Sun
Half of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is brilliant. Unfortunately, the other half of Zack Snyder's epic-length superhero movie is so bloated that it blunts the effect of the good stuff.

Name : Christopher Orr / Alias : The Atlantic
Batman v Superman is a tiresome, ill-tempered film, and one too lazy even to earn its dismal outlook.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
Eventually the script's illogic and the relentless pounding of the action scenes wear you down.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
Questions regarding violence and mayhem are drowned out by violence and mayhem. Such is the superhero life as directed by Zack Snyder. There is no problem that can't be solved with a cranium-rattling explosion or two.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
The heavyweight title bout between Batman and Superman is a smash to the senses, the same way being tossed around in a rollover car accident would jolt one's system.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
When it sings, Dawn of Justice is a wonder. When it drags, it still looks good and offers hints of a better scene just around the corner.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
A near-total drag, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice plays like a loose, unofficial quarter-billion-dollar remake of The Odd Couple, in which Oscar and Felix are literally trying to kill each other.

Name : Brian Truitt / Alias : USA Today
BvS will please those either waiting for the two main players to lock horns on a movie screen, or those who've just been pining for Wonder Woman forever.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
While the Marvel universe, now owned by Disney, is glib and sunny, it's a nice echo of Warner's past as a home to gangsters and gritty melodramas to find its DC world operating very much on the dark end of the street.

Name : Barry Hertz / Alias : Globe and Mail
The film might be pretty to look at, but narratively speaking, it is a disaster.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
Rather than escapism and sensory exhilaration, viewers get down in the mire with protagonists who grimace, scowl and wince their way through heroics with the joyless determination of shift workers making the doughnuts.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
[Plays] less like a prequel for the JLA then a greatest-hits medley of every superhero movie ever made - a little Dark Knight Rises here, a bit of Batman Begins there, all spiced up with some X-Men topicality. The thing is, none of it convinces.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
Although viewers may be riveted at times, the net experience isn't much fun.

Name : Tony Hicks / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
DC and Snyder jammed a lot into "Batman v Superman" to get back into the game. And it often works.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
And what of the title's promised skirmish? That face-off between two comics legends becomes but one in a series of big things bashing into other big things, which is what Snyder and writers Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer mistake for storytelling.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
In Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the Dark Knight and the Man of Steel duke it out and the audience loses.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
Constantly threatening to collapse from self-seriousness, this epic has way too much of everything, including CGI and Oscar winners up the wazoo.

Name : Andrew Barker / Alias : Variety
As a pure visual spectacle, however, Batman V Superman ably blows the hinges off the multiplex doors, and editor David Brenner does excellent work to comprehensibly streamline the chaos, capably captured by d.p. Larry Fong.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
Underdeveloped, overlong and stupendously dispiriting.

Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
It hurtles not with the kinetic momentum of Mad Max: Fury Road nor the comparatively spry skip of a Marvel movie, but with an operatic grandeur it sometimes earns and often doesn't.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Overlong, underdeveloped and almost entirely humorless, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice may please die-hard fans by pitting two DC icons against each other. Everyone else may want to wait for the next Marvel movie.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
When in doubt, [Snyder] simply slings another ingredient into the mix, be it an irradiated monster, an explosion on government premises, or the sharp smack of masonry on skull.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
The film may be imposing, but it's not fun.